Vicki Pettersson - The Scent of Shadows

“He was intimidating,” I said, not adding: Right up until the moment he pissed me off.

“Well, you didn’t look intimidated,” she said, then paused. I could feel her choosing her words carefully. “You looked powerful. Frightening.”

And there it was, out in the open. She shut her locker door, turning to me, and unlike in Saturn’s Orchard, she met my eye. “Look, today, when we did nothing…I just want you to know we’re not like that. We protect our own. We stick up for one another. We were just reacting, or not reacting, to the Shadow in you. I’m sorry things got out of hand. We all are.”

I glanced at the double doors Chandra had just disappeared through and made a disbelieving sound.

Vanessa answered it with a sigh of her own. “Look, Chandra’s one lifelong ambition has always been to serve this troop as the Archer. Every child of the Zodiac grows up dreaming of what it’s like to be an agent of Light.” She touched my arm, willing me to understand. “Your arrival here was a big blow to her, but she’ll come around in time.”

I remained unmoved, refusing to look her in the eye as I said, “She wants to vote me out of this troop. She called me a…an independent.” A rogue agent.

Vanessa’s impatience got the best of her and she snapped, “Yeah, and in doing so revealed her greatest fear. Because if you’re this generation’s Archer, what does that make her?”

I opened my mouth, before closing it again. Vanessa was right. Chandra might have the trust I so coveted from the rest of the troop, but she’d never be the person she aspired to be as long as I was living. I knew what that was like, not getting to be who you truly wanted.

I looked down, finding I was unconsciously rubbing at my arm. The puncture marks from Hunter’s whip could still be seen there. Injuries from conduits, I remembered, always scarred. “I don’t know if I can handle too many more training sessions like that,” I said, letting a trace of my own vulnerability show through. It’d be interesting to see what Vanessa did with it. Interesting…and telling too.

“It’s not just you, okay?” Vanessa glanced at the door to make sure Chandra had really left and no one else had arrived. “Things have been boiling over for weeks, months now. It’s never been like this before, we were all raised together, and we keep putting on a front like everything’s okay, but it’s not. It’s just…not.”

“Because Tekla said there was a traitor?”

She hesitated before nodding. “And no matter how much Warren denies it…well, look around.”

She gestured at the dormant glyphs, and the feeling of emptiness reached out to snag my attention again.

“Look, just come to the cantina,” she said, voice soft and imploring. “Let us start over.”

I’d have liked to have just said yes, but I had to wonder why she was being so open and friendly. I’d probably have jumped at the chance if only there wasn’t one big question mark surrounding her. Could she be the traitor?

Only one way to find out, I thought, and because of that I gave her a nod that had her smiling as she led me from the locker room.

“What are you guys celebrating, anyway?” I asked, our heels clicking in tandem against the stone floors.

“We’re not,” she said. One hand on the frosted double doors, she sighed, and turned her head to stare past me, back into the cavernous room. Her gaze landed on the dead Scorpionic glyph, so dark her eyes were almost smudged. “We’re remembering. It’s been six months to the day since Stryker was killed.” And she pushed open the door and disappeared.

The cantina was probably the most surprising room in the sanctuary so far, with couches in cubes of midnight velvet clustered around silver tables, the silver accenting echoed in the corner bar. As Vanessa made herself at home behind it, I looked up to find a ceiling glowing with stars, and shapes in the form of constellations—the Big Dipper, the Little, and others I recognized but couldn’t name.

There was a fish tank spanning the length of one wall, its occupants floating around in colorful, blissful ignorance. The opposite wall held a flat screen television. Sting was crooning softly about watching every step I took, and I smiled as the steel candles on each table shot to life as Vanessa pushed a button. It was more ultralounge than cantina, I thought, sinking into a velvet chair and the feeling of being enveloped in a futuristic womb.

“The four elements,” Vanessa said, gesturing around the room. “Fire, earth, water, air.”

I frowned. I saw the air amid the stars above, fire in the slim candles, and water, obviously, represented by the fish tank. But earth? I looked to Vanessa.

She smiled wryly. “From dust to dust.”

Us, I thought. We represented the earth, and the passing of all beings from it. Well, it certainly lent poignancy to the occasion.

“Maybe I shouldn’t be here,” I said, watching Vanessa stir one of two pitchers she’d filled with vodka, some sort of syrupy schnapps, and at least three other juices. The liquid was turning a disturbing shade of brown, like overbrewed ice tea, though Vanessa didn’t seem worried.

“You’re one of us now.” Taking in my skeptical expression, she tapped the spoon on the side of the sink and set it down. “I mean it. You just have to let the others get used to it…uh, you. That can’t happen if you seclude yourself away.”

I knew that, of course. But somewhere from the locker room to here all my I-am-the-Archer-hear-me-roar power had trickled away, and the thought of sitting in this intimate little enclave with five people who needed to “get used to me” was less than inviting. “I don’t want to intrude. I didn’t know him.”

“Well, I did, and he’d have liked you. Not just your looks, but your spirit.” She placed one pitcher in the stainless steel refrigerator to chill, and brought the other, along with two tumblers, over to me. “Stryker said we reinvented ourselves every time we stepped outside the sanctuary. Your effort, he would say, just your intention in being here, should be met with respect for what you left behind. He’d want you here.”

Her words settled me, so when she poured me a cup and held it out to me, I accepted it and sipped, tentatively. I took a larger swallow when I found it fruity and bright on the tongue, and it left my palate to settle gently in my belly with a low, glowing warmth. I’d stay. I’d watch. For a while anyway.

Then the door swung open and Chandra strode in, her brows burrowing down when she saw me. “What is she doing here?”

I didn’t snap back because what Vanessa had told me about Chandra had softened me a bit…and the drink was slowing my tongue anyway.

“Looks like she’s drinking,” Felix said, following her in. He flashed me his boyish smile, but I could see the worry lingering beneath it. Worry over the occasion? Or, like Vanessa earlier, worried about me, frightened of me? I couldn’t tell.

Micah wasn’t far behind, and he beelined for me, bending over to check again that his handiwork had survived the afternoon, his own worries about me apparently resolved. But after a moment he cupped my chin, eyeing me curiously. “You look different somehow. Can’t put my finger on it, though. Are you feeling okay?”

“Actually, I feel great. Like I just woke up from a long nap.”

“Sounds auspicious,” he said warily. I went ahead and watched him back. After a moment he blinked, then shrugged as he lowered himself into a seat, the bulk of him barely fitting between the armrests.

“If you believe in fairy tales.” Chandra dropped her weight into a chair across from me, but I was saved from having to think of an Oliviaesque reply by Hunter’s sudden appearance. He too paused when he saw me, and colors around him shifted from black to silver to gold as the energy spiked between us. I had no idea what that meant.